Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’S the Age of Wonders (Tor Ha-Pela’Ot)

THE GERMANIC REVlEW Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders (Tor Ha-pela’ot) DAVID SUCHOFF uch recent cultural criticism has argued that postmodern culture can be di- M agnosed as an unworked-through period of mourning, unable to come to terms with the Holocaust and the definitive break with modernist categories that it represents.’ Aharon Appelfeld’s Hebrew novella The Age of Wonders (1978) portrays the story of an assimilated Jewish writer and his family in Austria before the Holocaust, and the story of his son Bruno, who returns to Austria from Jerusalem after the war in search of his past. The text’s very structure seems to affirm the traditional categories of the modedpostmodern divide. Bruno’s father seems to represent the formalism of modernist fiction and its paradigmatic ethnic self-denial. As the Holocaust draws near in the first half of the novella, Jew- ish history is truly the nightmare from which the writer, as the “father” of Bruno’s apparently rootless, postmodern fate, unsuccessfully tries to awaken. “Father” (his only consistent name in the novella) constantly seeks to become an “Austrian writer,” with German as his “only language” and “mother tongue,” while critics constantly racialize him as a Jew and compare his writing to Kafka’s “parasitism” and unhealthy Jewish style.2 “Father” seems to represent classical modernism, struggling to break with the mass and enter elite culture, only to con- front the question of Jewish culture in its own terms, and those of its enemies, everywhere he turns. The novella’s second half can easily be read as the postmodern Jewish fate of the Jewish writer’s son. Like the protagonist of Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), Bruno in The Age of Wondus is an orphan who seeks to prove his filial tie to a prewar literary progenitor, and thus to ground his identity in the past. Appelfeld’s protagonist returns from Jerusalem to his native Austria, wear- ing his national Jewish identity on his sleeve. Yet despite Bruno’s secure ground- ing in a national homeland, he is seemingly unable to overcome his melancholy, 149 150 SUCHOFF or separate himself from an imaginary, bifurcated construction of the Jewishness that seems to be all that is left of the European Jewish world. The Israeli discovers only “mongrel” (234) Jews who have repressed their Jewish lineage, Asian students, and Asian “midgets” (235), guest workers who are forced to perform a parody of their national cultures on stage for the German-speaking audience. The difference between the “actual” Jews, or Asians, and imaginary or hybrid forms of ethnic identity, moreover, seems to be undecidable, and nationhood and He- brew in the novella’s second half do not seem to be enough to end Bruno’s melancholic anger toward his father’s world. The Hebrew-speaking son from Jerusalem, who cannot distinguish fictional from actual Jews on his return to his native “Knospen,” is just as melancholic about his failed marriage in Israel and seems without any secure connection at all to the German Jewish and Yiddish- speaking past. But The Age of Wonders unsettles this very distinction between “Father’s” German modernism and the postmodern predicament of the Hebrew novelist. The alternatives of a formalist German modernism, confronting but fleeing a grounded Jewish culture, and the postmodern proliferation of ethnic and national identities, where Judaism seems to become an impure, mixed perfor- mance, are instead taken into the texture of Appelfeld’s Hebrew and exploded as false alternatives. The intertext Appelfeld uses to explode this distinction between grounded and postmodern Jewish identity is the figure of Kafka, the writer whom Appelfeld himself, and most readers, see just below the surface of almost all of the crucial scenes of The Age of Wonders. In fact, the most “postmodern” sections of the novella’s second half uncannily resemble the bicultural allusions of Appelfeld’s Hebrew to the Kafkan themes of the first, “modernist” half, and the similarity is no accident. Both sections are rooted firmly in what Benjamin Harshav has described as the “tri or multilingual” Jewish cultural and linguistic system that flourished in creative ferment before the war.3 When the postmodern, post-Holocaust figure of Bruno returns to “Knospen” in search of his paternity, he encounters only half-Jews, bar denizens like Suzi who are proud of their difference but afraid to announce it, with nothing but an “imaginary” connection to their tradition (234). The Hebrew of those scenes finds its source in the German modernism of Kafka’s Castle: the bar scenes where K. encounters Frieda, or Pepi, or other ethnically marked but indetermi- nate figures. Bruno’s Hebrew “patrimony,” in other words, and the source of his postmodern dilemma, is that his “predecessor” tongue is German. The figure for the postwar Hebrew speaker who goes to the diaspora in search of his origins discovers Kafka, Appelfeld’s dominant subtext, but also a figure for the hidden openness of tradition whence he comes. The novella is thus more accurately read not as Bruno’s but Appelfeld’s own belated reunion with Kafka as a figure for the multilingual Jewish literary tradition in which he writes.“ Appelfeld’s reunion in this novella is thus not with a “father,” but with the Kafka who repre- sented his German writing, with its Hebrew sources, as a “new Kabbalah,” a form of Jewish writing as well.5 KAFKA AND THE POSTMODERN DIVIDE 151 The creative brilliance of Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders is to show that the German writing of Kafka was already double, open to Jewish and non-Jewish languages alike, part of a Jewish literature that might have been written in Ger- man but transmits deeply Jewish linguistic as well as national concerns. The ex- ploration of Kafka in Appelfeld’s novella makes him a figure not for monolin- gual culture as the father’s law, but for the openness of the Central European Jewish tradition, a writing that was alive to Hebrew, German, Yiddish, and other languages as well. Bruno, of course, often feels just the opposite, especially in the novella’s second, postwar half. As a postmodern, post-Holocaust son, Bruno’s melancholia is given the precise figure of being the son of a tradition without a father. At the end of the first half, as Bruno is about to be Bar Mitzvah, literally a son of the commandment, and a reader of the Hebrew language, the Jewish “father” abandons the son, about to speak Hebrew, for the gentile baroness in Vienna. But if the predecessor figure for Appelfeld as a “strong” postmodern writer is Kafka, the desire to mourn, or displace the scandal of a mixed modem origin--both Hebrew, and German-may be narratively com- pelling, but beside the novella’s deeper point. Bruno’s postmodern melancholia cannot mask the fact that both “Father” and son are born into one nation, yet speak the language of another. Both are transnational in crucial ways, part of a tradition-whether voiced in German. or the modern Hebrew that Bruno speaks-that was open to outside influence from the start. The Age of Wonders’ conclusion, where Bruno lifts his hand against Brum, the closet Jew who mouths anti-Semitic venom and remained in Austria after surviv- ing the Holocaust, can of course be understood in simpler Zionist terms. As the rep- resentative of an Israeli generation looking back at the diaspora, Bruno seems to vent the rage of Israeli sons against their weak modernist fathers who hailed from German-speaking lands but deserted their Hebrew sons. But Appelfeld’s critical prose defines Kafka’s writing as a different kind of paternal legacy, not a figure swamped in anxiety or self-denial but the author of a Gernian prose that was un- denvrtitten, as in a palimpsest, by its Hebrew concerns. Appelfeld explained his at- traction to Kafka to Philip Roth by pointing out the dual linguistic depth Kafka’s discovered in the apparently thin Jewish culture he received: The marvelous thing is that the barrenness brought [Kafka] not to self-denial or self- hatred but rather to a kmd of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language, the Yiddish theatre, Ha- sidism. Zionism, and even the idea of moving to Mandate Palestine. This is the Kafka of his journals, which are no less gripping than his works. I found a palpable embodiment of Kafka’s Jewish involvement in his Hebrew handwriting, for he had studied Hebrew and knew it. His handwriting is clear and amazingly beautiful, showing his effort and concentration as in his German handwriting. but his Hebrew handwriting has an additional aura of love for the isolated letter.‘ In this description that refers to literature as much as life, Kafka’s texts are tellingly imagined as a kind of handwriting, penned by an author who could write German and Hebrew with equal care. Both, Appelfeld suggests, display the con- I52 SUCHOFF centration that marks an authentic identity, but the “amazingly beautiful” writing for Appelfeld, the Hebrew subtext, may be invisible to the reader who can see only “self-hatred’ in the Jewish writer composing left to right in German words. Yet like many bilingual or bicultural individuals, Appelfeld points out, Kafka’s real love is beneath, but also contained within, the actual language he most often used and spoke. That German itself, he insists, must be understood as open to the Hebrew. And the Hebrew in Kafka’s own period-when both he and S.

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